ACPI + Promise IDE = disk corruption :-(((

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

It's just a word of warning for those who are trying ACPI with the latest
kernels.

I enabled ACPI in 2.4.5-ac17 (2.4.5-ac16 works fine with the same config
except ACPI). When I booted I saw a message

ACPI: If experiencing system slowness, try adding "acpi=no-idle" to
cmdline

and after that ...

reiserfs: checking transaction log (device 21:04) ...

Normally it takes few seconds before the system goes further, but that
time it tool much longer (one minute maybe), and the next message was
something like "hde: DMA timeout"

I hit reset hoping to boot the system with "acpi=no-idle", but GRUB
couldn't load stage2, which resides on the root partition (reiserfs).

I had to install Linux on another drive and run reiserfsck. It found many
errors, fixed them all, and now I'm happily running my old system.

I also checked the same kernel with "acpi=no-idle" - it works. The ACPI
messages are now:

ACPI: Core Subsystem version [20010208]
ACPI: Subsystem enabled
ACPI: System firmware supports: C2 C3
ACPI: plvl2lat=10 plvl3lat=20
ACPI: C2 enter=143 C2 exit=35
ACPI: C3 enter=858 C3 exit=71
ACPI: Not using ACPI idle
ACPI: System firmware supports: S0 S1 S5

The config file is here: http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/linux/config
dmesg output is here: http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/linux/dmesg

Possibly important data:

Kernel compiled with gcc-3.0
Motherboard Micron SE440-BX2
BIOS 4S4EB2X0.05A.0016.P15 (the latest)
1 Intel Pentium III 550MHz
Root filesystem is reiserfs
Root filesystem is on Promise PDC20267 ide controller
Local APIC (but not IO-APIC) is used.

I can make more experiments (with other hard drives) if needed.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin